Itchy Ears and Intersections of Truth

Taken on a December evening traveling north on 1-45 to Houston

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth...”
[2 Timothy 4:3-5]

I guess there is a certain sort of comfort in living inside a lie – especially of one’s own making. As in the “choose your bliss” mentality, people do have the opportunity to pick and choose what to believe and what to discard. Human free will preserves the option to throw absolutes out the window. Morality is easily morphed into utilitarianism. What is good is what best serves the moment – and that in one’s own eyes.

It seems that this is the way some people choose to survive. Self-deception allows a person to escape the need for change. It means no course adjustment is needed. We can ignore the theological warning: Chosen paths of least resistance are not morally neutral! They lead downhill and are lined with sleep-number self-defense systems that allow us to remain lulled in a spiritual sleep.

Reality does offer occasional jolts of unexpected, pronounced truth. For some, these jolts are a welcome, though not necessarily comfortable, road sign that reorients them toward the ultimate that God once called “Good.” For others, jolts of truth are perceived as existential threats. The construction of mental bridges, tunnels, and all sorts of internal infrastructure occupy minds determined to circumvent the truth. The “fleece police” of gossip and chatter go before them to identify potential threats that might puncture a false reality.

In the end, thanks be to God, truth will be told and experienced. Jesus said it would be shouted from the rooftops. I think that promise must be for those who refused to hear when it was whispered personally in Divine Love by the Holy Spirit.

There’s an impassable abutment that crosses every known path of humans that is not aligned with the truth in Christ Jesus. Zigzag as we may, spiraling determinedly around our ‘stages of faith’ we will finally realize that “we can’t get there from here” unless we want God’s truth more than our own self-deceptions, right teaching more than content that scratches our self-inflamed itchy ears, and true friends that tell us what we need to hear instead of what we want to hear.

Truth in our path is more than an intersection we can bypass or mentally engineer away. It is an opportunity for life that entails some level of necessary death. For some it sounds like thunder, to others, angels.

“Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” [Galatians 4:16]

Love in the Lord,
PH